Paolo Sorrentino’s “This Must Be the Place” seems like the sort of film that, based on its premise alone, could end up either as a complete success or a dismal failure with no middle ground. The interesting thing about this film is that it has received notices from both ends of the spectrum. I suppose it’s easy to understand why; “This Must Be the Place” asks its audience to accept a lot — not the least of which is Sean Penn, its star, playing a retired Goth rocker with a kittenish whisper of a voice and a tendency to walk around his hometown in full makeup and regalia — but if you accept it, the film is rewarding, funny and humane in ways the cinema hasn’t seen since Jonathan Demme’s heyday.

In fact, “This Must Be the Place” asks you to compare it to the films of Demme and another great European chronicler of the American road, Wim Wenders. You’ll already be thinking about Wenders when Harry Dean Stanton pops up; likewise, the film’s warmth and humanistic laughs bring to mind Demme, as does of course a preoccupation with its pop soundtrack and David Byrne (whose Talking Heads song lends the movie its title and pops up throughout the film, most memorably in an extended concert sequence with Byrne himself). I don’t think “This Must Be the Place” hits the heights of Demme or Wenders, but it’s like a deep cut from one of those filmmakers, a familiar story told with feeling and humor unseen since their best work.

Penn stars as Cheyenne, who visually recalls The Cure’s Robert Smith, a retired, borderline agoraphobic rocker who lives in his Dublin estate, only leaving to buy groceries and hang out in a coffee shop with a teenager (Eve Hewson) he’s befriended. His wife, Jane (Frances McDormand), is as sturdy as he is not. She’s a firefighter, but primarily his support system, and the glimpses at their marriage we get are one of the film’s early pleasures.

Then the plot, such as it is, kicks in: Cheyenne’s estranged father is dying. He travels to New York City to discover he is too late, and that his father, a Holocaust survivor, was on the trail of the Nazi who humiliated him at Auschwitz. Out of general boredom and seeking a cure to his malaise, Cheyenne picks up the trail and heads across the country in a borrowed pickup.

The trip is a coming-of-age story, in essence, for the 50-year-old Cheyenne, as he comes to terms with his family’s legacy and his own issues along the way. That sounds less interesting than it is, as the film is not underscored with spoonfed emotional moments, keeping instead its off-kilter sense of humor (and how could it help but have one with Penn and that bouffant?).

Sorrentino’s visual cues are clever and inventive, and his screenplay, co-written with Umberto Contarello, keeps things moving brisky, if episodically, from one comical encounter and interlude to another. And Penn, as the film’s anchor, is terrific and wry, sinking his teeth into a role in ways that recall the actor’s best work, if not as somber and serious. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you have any fondness for askew looks at the American landscape, “This Must Be the Place” is a worthy entrant into that subgenre.

About This Blog

Paolo Sorrentino’s “This Must Be the Place” seems like the sort of film that, based on its premise alone, could end up either as a complete success or a dismal failure with no middle ground. The interesting thing about this film is that it has received notices from both ends of the spectrum. I suppose it’s easy to understand why; “This Must Be the Place” asks its audience to accept a lot — not the least of which is Sean Penn, its star, playing a retired Goth rocker with a kittenish whisper of a voice and a tendency to walk around his hometown in full makeup and regalia — but if you accept it, the film is rewarding, funny and humane in ways the cinema hasn’t seen since Jonathan Demme’s heyday.

In fact, “This Must Be the Place” asks you to compare it to the films of Demme and another great European chronicler of the American road, Wim Wenders. You’ll already be thinking about Wenders when Harry Dean Stanton pops up; likewise, the film’s warmth and humanistic laughs bring to mind Demme, as does of course a preoccupation with its pop soundtrack and David Byrne (whose Talking Heads song lends the movie its title and pops up throughout the film, most memorably in an extended concert sequence with Byrne himself). I don’t think “This Must Be the Place” hits the heights of Demme or Wenders, but it’s like a deep cut from one of those filmmakers, a familiar story told with feeling and humor unseen since their best work.

Penn stars as Cheyenne, who visually recalls The Cure’s Robert Smith, a retired, borderline agoraphobic rocker who lives in his Dublin estate, only leaving to buy groceries and hang out in a coffee shop with a teenager (Eve Hewson) he’s befriended. His wife, Jane (Frances McDormand), is as sturdy as he is not. She’s a firefighter, but primarily his support system, and the glimpses at their marriage we get are one of the film’s early pleasures.

Then the plot, such as it is, kicks in: Cheyenne’s estranged father is dying. He travels to New York City to discover he is too late, and that his father, a Holocaust survivor, was on the trail of the Nazi who humiliated him at Auschwitz. Out of general boredom and seeking a cure to his malaise, Cheyenne picks up the trail and heads across the country in a borrowed pickup.

The trip is a coming-of-age story, in essence, for the 50-year-old Cheyenne, as he comes to terms with his family’s legacy and his own issues along the way. That sounds less interesting than it is, as the film is not underscored with spoonfed emotional moments, keeping instead its off-kilter sense of humor (and how could it help but have one with Penn and that bouffant?).

Sorrentino’s visual cues are clever and inventive, and his screenplay, co-written with Umberto Contarello, keeps things moving brisky, if episodically, from one comical encounter and interlude to another. And Penn, as the film’s anchor, is terrific and wry, sinking his teeth into a role in ways that recall the actor’s best work, if not as somber and serious. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you have any fondness for askew looks at the American landscape, “This Must Be the Place” is a worthy entrant into that subgenre.